I have mostly sworn off TV news. Every once in awhile I’ll watch a local newscast but am always disappointed that there’s very little local reporting about stuff that matters. The producers never miss a chance to run some freakish footage—violence, animal antics, etc.—from San Diego, Florida, wherever. And national cable news is a […]

I was treated to a whole bunch of this. Our trip to Mendocino, California, occupied us so fully and so well that I’m only just now writing this post today (Monday) on a 737 flying home. Only last Wednesday we were on a 737 to San Francisco. On our flight out, a young man with long blonde […]

Here’s a post I wrote for the Easterseals national blog before we left for the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. An opinion piece about the banning of plastic straws in different businesses and municipalities published in the Washington Post earlier this month caught my attention. Written by disability advocate Karin Hitselberger, the piece was brilliant at […]

If you’re a Trump supporter, you think the whole Russian investigation is just sour grapes, a conspiracy of some sort, or that maybe a little of all of it is true but it’s no worse than stuff that’s happened in the past. Or it’s silly paranoia, sort of like the old movie, “The Russians are […]

In the age of “fake news,” ultra partisan publications and broadcast channels, and nutjob websites, we—for the time being, anyway—enjoy a pretty robust press. It’s really easy to dump on “the media,” but that’s painting with too broad a brush. Good journalism and good writing are hard work. A lot harder (and generally, more time-consuming […]